new book
released June 15th, 2024

praise for Each Unkept Secret:

“Donna Prinzmetal may question how her poetry can possible ‘measure the distance/ between the living and the dead,” but it does just that and more: many of her poems both measure and collapse that distance, creating a riveting lyric voice that can fashion :the right syntax for grieving.” With markedly fresh and vivid imagery, she employs memory’s non-linearity, giving us striking elegies, eulogies, and tributes—poems to both her dead and living loved-ones. Taking us into her confidence, telling us her secrets, Prinzmetal gives us a rare gift. Courageous and movingly intimate, her voice speaks the poignant music of mortality, “the cadence between pain’s husky gasps.”

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, author of My Kindred

“One marvel of Each Unkept Secret is how the sequence weaves deeper into a life by way of evocative touchstones. As the striking poems wend through details and damage with a quiet, relentless courage, we come to care for the fullness of a family. yet, Prinzmetal is wily, too. What we know is as important as what we don’t, and the absence makes from for a haunting, underlying silence.”

—John C. Morrison, author of Monkey Island

“Though she describes loss as ‘a foreign country I had visited / against my will,’ in these searing poems, Donna Prinzmetal maps the territory of loss and grief with a compelling emotional precision. Each Unkept Secret is a revelatory book.”

—John Brehm, author Dharma Talk and No Day at the Beach

Prinzmetal’s premier collection Snow White, When No One Was Looking is a collection of persona poetry, investigating the relationship between Snow White’s inner and outer world as she reflects on her journey and tells us her secrets.

“Poet Donna Prinzmetal has written an exciting book of poems in Snow White, When No One Was Looking. The poet holds up many lenses to this fairytale creature. The results are eerie, enchanting, and provocative. Here is Snow White speaking of herself: ‘Niveous, I am albescent, the whitewash, the bleach, to make allowances for my own ordinary face.’ This book is a keeper.”

—Pete Sears, author of Long Day and small talk

“With intoxicating imagery and bold, cutting-edge voicing, Donna Prinzmetal takes us into the dark and lucid heart of the Snow White fairy tale where insights startle us awake and we come to believe that ‘speech can catch fire’. Snow White, When No One Was Looking is a book to keep by your bed and to treasure.”

—Cathy Colman, author of Time Crunch and Beauty’s Tattoo

“‘Caught between reason and forgetting’ and between ‘one heartbeat and the next’ Snow White comes alive again in Snow White, When No One Was Looking. The ‘final alibi of surprise’ of this book is Donna Prinzmetal’s contemporary, dark translation of the fable, her use of fresh language like ‘snow filling the [warm] room of a tulip’s bloom.’ Using a ‘pearl-handled knife’ diction of defiance and dialect of vertigo, she astonishes each page with something new. This is an incandescent book. You’ll want to read it more than once.”

—Elena Karina Byrne, author of If This Makes You Feel Nervous and No, Don’t

—read the complete Book Review by Carolyn Martin